Steven Colbert has proposed a solution to the BP spill problem (which seems to just get worse and worse every day). Maybe I’m just punchy, but….well, you watch and see if it doesn’t make you smile, too.
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Drug Test the Unemployed? Is Hatch a Conservative, or not?
Image by elycefeliz via Flickr
So now GOP Senator Orrin Hatch is proposing a law to mandate drug testing all unemployed workers. You would have to test negative for drugs to receive unemployment compensation.
Small, minor detail: Such a law would be unconstitutional. It would be a major violation of rights.
OK, we all know that the Republican claim to be fiscally conservative is a joke (a lie, actually). They take over the government when there are large surpluses accumulated by Democratic presidents, create or increase tax giveways for the rich, and then spend the U.S. into major deficits.
Like Reagan, who created the hugest deficit up till then and greatly increased the size of the government. Like Bush-Cheney who took over a surplus created by Clinton-Gore through some very painful cuts in government and in social services—and turned it into a huge deficit through huge tax cuts and reckless spending. So we expect double-talk and chicanery from the GOP. They lie.
Can you imagine how much it would cost to test every single worker who applies for unemployment benefits? The expense would be stunning!
Maybe Hatch’s delusion is that instituting such an (illegal) law would keep many people from applying for benefits, thereby making the unemployment figures smaller. Pulease!
Maybe instead, we should use the money to institute a sanity test for senators and representatives. Those who turn out to be sociopaths, psychopaths, empathy-impaired, dishonest or pathological liars would be disqualified from serving and forced to resign—and ineligible to ever run for any public office again.
Now that would be a worthwhile law. And since the U.S. is the employer, and the GOP advocates unlimited rights for employers, how could they object?
Oh, right, that hypocrisy thing…
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Should the USA Seize BP?
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A new organization, Seize BP, has a novel idea: Let’s (the USA) seize BP and manage them till they do right—sort of the way we seized the big banks.
Doing that—or even the possibility of doing it—might just cause some other big polluters and wrong-doers to straighten up and fly right—for awhile at least.
When corporations become so large and politically powerful that they act as though they are above the law, and the corporate officers have no accountability for the deaths and damage they cause, maybe seizing the company and reforming it is the only viable solution.
I had a PR client many years ago that that had happened to. A natural gas distribution company had sold exclusive natural gas supply contracts to several large Texas cities. They planned to buy the gas later, whenever the prices were at their lowest, and make a killing.
My client had sold natural gas that they did not actually own. Then the US deregulated the price of natural gas. Prices soared. Continue reading →
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Get a Job with a Progressive Organization
Image via CrunchBase
Many progressives bemoan the necessity of working for right-wing corporations to make a living. It can be a soul-wounding experience.
We forget sometimes that there are jobs that allow you to work for causes, companies and nonprofits you can believe in. Or at least jobs working for organizations that do not make you feel like a complete hypocrite.
How about doing IT work for a progressive nonprofit or for political campaigns? Want to do human resources work for a union? There are opportunities out there. Want to be a full-time union organizer?
I have added a Jobs for Change widget (from www.change.org) to the right-hand column of this blog. Tell your friends, especially new college graduates. These jobs can be especially good for the politically active (or wanting to be) new graduate who might otherwise be discouraged by their lack of experience in the current job market.
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How Haiti Got This Way and Why We Owe Them Help
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Haiti is an amazing country. Sure, it is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. But that is not the fault of the brave and generous Haitian people.
Haiti was formerly one of the most brutal French plantation colonies. Some of the planters there were monsters of sadism and depravity. Read the history.
The rum and sugar trade was so lucrative that it was much cheaper to buy more slaves than to take care of the current batch of Africans. So the plantation owners/managers just worked them to death and bought more.
Besides the obvious cruelty and inhumanity of that practice, there was another drawback. Eventually all the relatively docile peasant farmers who had made the plantations such a success were all used up. In West Africa the European slavers then fomented wars among the tribes and bought the resulting captives as slaves.
These later slaves were mostly highly trained and experienced warriors and sometimes shamans or other spiritual leaders, adept in magic, martial arts, espionage, and other practices. Those were valuable leaders and valuable skills for, say, a revolution.
They escaped by the dozens off the crowded docks of Port au Prince and disappeared into the rugged mountains of Haiti. There they joined forces with former enemies from West Africa and a few tough remnants of the indigenous Indians and formed a formidable fighting force.
They were able to infiltrate the plantations to pass information and coordinate a successful revolution in 1791 against the brutal plantation system in Haiti that was so very profitable for France.
Napoleon sent troops. The Haitians defeated them.
The Spanish sent troops. Ditto.
The successful revolution in Haiti is said to be one reason that Napoleon sold the Louisiana Purchase to Thomas Jefferson in 1803.
When Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of South America, lost his first revolution, the Haitians took him in. They outfitted a new army for him. The only obligation? He must abolish slavery in every country he freed.
The U.S. was still 60 years from even nominally abolishing slavery. A black democracy only a short sail from U.S. shores? Unthinkable! Not to be tolerated.
In (I think) the 1830s France sent an armada of powerful gunboats to blockade the coastal cities of Haiti, threatening to destroy all the coastal towns (at great loss of life) if the government of the fledgling democracy did not agree to pay “reparations” to France for freeing themselves from slavery.
The French forced the Haitians to pay virtually their whole national income to France till the end of the 19th century. Do not criticize Haiti for being a backward country. All the money that should have been used to build roads, schools, universities, hospitals, and other infrastructure had to be paid to the French for generations.
But wait, there is more: The United States of America has invaded tiny Haiti 13 times!
Throughout the 20th century we repeatedly deposed democratically elected presidents of Haiti who stood up for the Haitian people against U.S. corporate interests. We imposed and supported brutal dictatorships.
Popular, democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted by the CIA under President Clinton and exiled from Haiti for 3 years. When he came back, he was reelected.
The U.S. kidnapped him at gunpoint under President Bush and held him incommunicado in Central Africa for weeks. The Bush government threatened the President of Jamaica with similar treatment for offering sanctuary to the Haitian president and his family.
So do not blame the Haitians for their predicament. The U.S. and France put them in the position they are currently in. Only Venezuela, Cuba, and a handful of other countries freed by Bolivar have ever stood up for them.
We owe the Haitians our support for the movement to insist that the French repay the so-called “reparations” they extorted from Haiti at gunpoint in the 19th Century.
America owes the Haitians help and monetary aid now to make up abusing them in the past. And because they need help as our fellow human beings and near neighbors in the New World.
When it gets right down too it, we also owe the Haitians for a huge chunk of middle America—from Louisiana to Idaho—known as the Louisiana Purchase.
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- Obama administration grants undocumented Haitians Temporary Protected Status. (thinkprogress.org)
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- Help Haiti. Drop the debt. (one.org)
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Forced Labor (Slavery?) in Florida!
Coalition of Immokalee Workers protest. Image by Getty Images via Daylife
What is it with Florida? The reports just keep coming in about Immokalee County, where poor immigrant workers are lured with the promise of jobs and then trapped in brutally inhumane conditions and not allowed to escape.
Over and over we have been asked to boycott this or that fast food restaurant in the last few years. After awhile we hear that the restaurant has nobly given in and agreed to pay a whopping extra penny a ton for tomatoes or whatever. And so we go back to eating there, maybe.
But the truth is none of that money ever goes to the poor workers, slaving under that hot sun without water, abused by overseers, and forced to live in abysmal squalor. None of that money is ever passed along to them so that their children can quit working in the fields to help feed the family.
Instead, the money is kept by the growers association, which has been running this racket for decades and does not want anything to interfere with it. So poor workers continue to be lured to Immokalee County with false promises, only to labor and live in conditions that would make most third-world countries look enticing.
For more information see the website of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Their stories will break your heart and turn your stomach. And make you angry–not only at what is being done to them, but that it is being done right here in the United States of America.
From election fixing to virtual slavery. There is a deep pattern of corruption here. When will someone clean up Florida?
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Remembering the Preventable Tragedy of Hurricane Katrina
Image by dannyman via Flickr
Four years after Hurricane Katrina, only 19 percent of residents have returned to the poorest neighborhoods. That is a disaster for them, but it is not an accident.
A wealthy New Orleans resident gave away the game in 2005, during the Katrina disaster. Referring to the poor, black population of the flooded areas, he told the Wall Street Journal “we do not want them back”.
Standing beside the swimming pool in the backyard of his New Orleans mansion, this latter day “Southern gentleman” said that the storm was a good opportunity to “clean up the city” by getting rid of “those people” (the poor and black who have still not been allowed to move back in to New Orleans). And so the New Orleans elite have managed to do since the storm.
Perfectly sound public housing and homes were torn down to ensure that the poorest people could not return to New Orleans. Naturally the land for the public housing units, only a fraction of which will be replaced (somewhere, sometime, supposedly), is being sold.
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Right-Wing Organizes Unruly Mobs to Prevent Healthcare Discussion
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The insurance giants and big pharma feel really threatened by the prospect of healthcare reform. Insurance is spending $1.4 million each day to fight reform.
As part of that effort, the right-wing is organizing “unruly mobs” to disrupt healthcare town meetings across America.
Unfortunately for them, the behavior is so obvious, so obnoxious, and so antidemocratic that reporters have noticed and written about it all over the country. Here are a few samples of the media coverage of the carefully orchestrated disruptions of public discussions.
The Post-Standard
“‘It was like he was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail,’ [one of the protesters] said. ‘It was a beautiful thing.’ Actually, for anyone who treasures a functioning democracy, where ideas from all sides are respectfully debated, it’s a pretty ugly development.” [RIP, public discourse?, Post-Standard, 8/5/09]
Herald Times Reporter
“He’s absolutely right. There’s no place for mob behavior in these kinds of situations, and it shouldn’t be tolerated. We always can agree to disagree, but shouting down an adversary won’t accomplish anything.” [Editorial: No room for mobs, Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter, 8/5/09]
SalisburyPost.com
“The protesters jeer, heckle, wave placards, shout over the speaker and carry on much like the student radicals of yore. Memos that have cropped up on the Web show that these protests are not intended to be any kind of dialogue but purely disruptive, preferably ending with the member of Congress forced to retreat. Videos of the demonstrations almost immediately appear on the Internet. The idea is to make opposition to health-care reform seem more widespread than it really is.” [Beware of staged disruptions, Salisbury Post, 8/5/09]
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Disbelief That We Allow Harm for Profit Is “Why Evil Can Exist”
In a devastatingly insightful column in the Huffington Post, naturopath Anne Dunev writes about our broken healthcare system and what should be done to fix it. Dunev has practiced naturopathic medicine both in Britain and in the United States. She has experienced how both systems work.
Not surprisingly Dunev is not impressed with the President’s healthcare proposal. She thinks it does not go nearly far enough.
Dunev urges us to do away with insurance entirely, because it costs too much and contributes nothing to healthcare. In fact, she feels that insurance companies by their nature are counterproductive to healthcare.
She also takes aim at the bloated and cynical pharmaceutical industry, which spends more on advertising and promotion than on research and development. Properly prescribed prescription drugs now kill 2 1/2 times as many people as car wrecks ever year.
Not only that, properly prescribed prescription drugs kill three times a many people each year as illegal drugs. And the FDA, filled with former and future big pharma executives is the fox guarding the hen house.
In both insurance and pharmaceuticals, Dunev marshals the facts to show that the profit motive corrupts absolutely.
As Dunev says, “Most decent people cannot conceive that anyone would profit from knowingly harming others. That is the flaw in capitalism. And that is one reason that evil can exist.“
Read her column for yourself. It is concise, insightful, and based on factual evidence. It is also chilling! Read it and weep.
And then get busy and do something about fixing the problem!
Lobby your congresspersons, write to your newspaper. Become an online activist. For that matter, lobby your friends and neighbors to take action, too.
Taking action now could save your life or that of someone you love.
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Now Anyone Can Track Your Email Address
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If you are avoiding a stalker or evading an abusive former partner, your life could depend on not leaving a trail online.
If you are looking for a job or trying to hold onto your existing job, your livelihood could depend on not posting anything online that could possibly offend your employer or potential employer—either the individual or the corporation.
You may think that if you post “anonymously,” or make up a user name, that employers or potential employers cannot track you. You may think you can avoid stalkers by not using your real name. Think again.
For just $17 a month (and up), anyone can subscribe to a new service that can track an email addresses and display all the online profiles associated with that address.
Write something that someone doesn’t like, or that makes them want to find you for any reason, and the new service, called Flowtown, can show them the Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking profiles associated with that email address.
The new service, which describes itself as being under the category of social media tools or social media advertising, specializes in Facebook promotion or Facebook marketing. Marketers can use Flowtown for purposes other than just monitoring the activities of individuals.
If you are smart, and you want to make controversial comments on line, comments of which your boss, spouse, or potential employer might not approve, you will get an email address that is not associated with any other account (such as a gmail address) and use it for potentially controversial comments.
If you are looking for more info on like-minded people, and you don’t mind spending a little money to do it, well, now there is Flowtown. Let me know what you think about that.
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Posted in: Culture & Society, News.
Tagged: anonymous posting · controversial comments · Facebook marketing · Flowtown · monitoring employee email addresses · social marketing · social network profiles · stalking · tracking email addresses · Twitter